Gift Guide 2012 - Boing Boing »
Is That All There Is?,. o. I discovered the work of Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte before I read Hergé's Tintin, even though it's now clear to me that Swarte's style was inspired by Hergé. But I would ...

Gerry Read: Jummy »
The 20-year old British art-house producer's debut reveals a dedication to haze and clutter mostly absent on his early singles. Mixing big, wet drum sounds with short, cloudy bursts of piano and mumbl...

Ben Hammersley's speech to the IAAC, last year.
Stumbled across this article again due to a technical quirk of my news reading. And while re-reading it I discovered this wonderful slogan that comes straight out of the Situationists!

Retrophagísta, The Retrophagists, Retrophagy.
An imaginary (currently) art movement that uses the deliberate and conscious consumption, rumination, recombination and regurgitation of the past to create the future and the new.

A positive counterpoint to the negative, expensive ugliness of the cocaine decision that is Retromania. That just mines the past out of a fake hip nostalgia or cynically recapitulates the past for profit without adding anything new except context.
[from: Google+ Posts]

Unknown #001-004
I was irritated by the name, by how hard it makes it to find any information in the usual places. And this is a great review Angus, with a point elegantly put. Especially the last line. "Well, sadly, some of them just aren't very good."

Except that, I like all the tracks that I've heard so far. It's inoffensive IDM armchair dance music. It's well put together. It may be lacking in pizazz but it's not bad. 2/5 seems a bit harsh. It gets 3.5/5 from me.

There's a strong possibility that Unknown is actually Ryan Vail from N Ireland. Perhaps after the hype of "Unknown" Ryan will emerge under his own name. I've been trying to find his Colours EP to see if that's any good or different.

Review - Unknown - #001-#004 »
Remember "Sicko Cell"? Remember how we all huddled around forums and YouTube comment threads as if they were oil drum fire pits in an urban wasteland, trading rumours, speculating, stoking the flames?...

The core argument is that modern life has taken on an atemporal quality in that the sheer quantity of mankind's creative noise is making socioligical cause and effect hard to see. Along the way he looks at questions around the difference between the reality of 1955, analogue remnants of 1955, digitised renmants of 1955 and 1955 as seen though the usual historical revisionism of both popular culture and historians. One aspect I think is missing in the argument is the effect of exponential growth in content. We are both creating quantities of content and forgetting it along an exponential growth curve. So content from 1955 is becoming a smaller and smaller part of the whole at that same exponential rate but also it is viewed through the filters of the ever increasing pile of content produced between then and now where half of all that content is less than a year old, 3/4 of it is less than 2 years old.

I really want to paraphrase one sentence in the article, thusly:- One tires of this corny new-media rhetoric where things are always pre-fixed "post-, future-, new-, or neo-" Of course they are post and future and new, but not for long.

Bruce has thing about Brazilian Anthropophagy and the Anthropophagics. This was an art movement starting in the 1920s in Sao Paolo that consciously ate European and American influences in order to ruminate on them and then regurgitate them as something new. More recently the abravanista movement around musical artists such as Suba and Cibelle have resurrected this idea. This plus the inimitable Simon Reynolds make me want to coin another neologism based on his ideas around retromania and hauntology. I think we need "Retrophagy"; The conscious consumption of historical ideas and approaches as source material for rumination, combination and then regurgitation as something new. This is not the laziness of simply repeating or glorifying the past for profit but rather the deliberate use of it as part of the creative process.

Ultraísta is a pretty cool name for a band. Adding ísta to a word adds a frisson of danger, conjuring mental images of Che Guevara and other romanticised revolutionaries. Which means there's a word in here somewhere combining future(s), edges, hipsterism, "post", Modern and ísta that we can use to accentuate our smugness of knowing and seeing just a little more than the average joes. (grin!) So what are we, Modernístas? Futurístas?

This week's cocktail is one I was introduced to last week (thanks Mark) but is one of the oldest cocktails in the book. It dates to 1859 when John Schiller christened it in his bar the Sazerac Coffee House. It's named after a Cognac popular then in New Orleans mixed with Peychaud bitters. There are three variations based on Cognac, Whiskey or as in this recipe from Dale deGroff a mix of the two.

Get two rocks glasses and put one in the freezer. In the other, splash of Absinthe, Pernod or Pastis; swirl and then pour away. Then assemble in the glass:-
Ice cubes
25ml Cognac
25ml Rye Whiskey
12ml Simple Syrup
2 dashes Peychaud (or Creole)
2 dashes Angostura (or Aromatic)
Stir with the ice cubes to dilute and chill to taste
Retrieve the other rocks glass from the freezer and strain the cocktail into it.
Garnish with a flamed lemon peel.

The finished cocktail should be clear, faintly pink and have no ice. Its for sipping. It's only really a double shot and a bit of liquid so the serving glass can be quite a small tumbler. It's got lots of old fashioned and complex flavours and makes a great change from the usual sweet and sour or spirit and vermouth.

Peace News »
Welcome to Peace News, the newspaper for the UK grassroots peace and justice movement. We seek to oppose all forms of violence, and to create positive change based on cooperation and responsibility. S...